"Slippery" (1985)

Drumm Booklet 19

Today, I've been looking at the Lafferty–Gaiman correspondence and thinking about Barnaby Sheen, which led me to think about Lafferty's "Slippery," the title story in Slippery and Other Stories, published by Chris Drumm. I've written before about my dislike for Neil Gaiman's entry on Lafferty in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Still, one sentence in particular continues to bother me: "he has been understood by some as essentially light-hearted and by others as a solitary, stringent moralist."

I'll try to be measured here. I don't know who these "some" are. Anyone reading Lafferty with attention ought to see that he is both light-hearted and morally stringent and that his version of this improbable pairing is part of what makes him singular. The problem is that sneaky word "essentially," which slouches into the sentence just before the false dilemma. Gaiman, whose literary taste often leans toward serious fantasists like Hope Mirrlees and Avram Davidson, misses what makes Lafferty matter most by leaving it there, as if either horn were remotely adequate.

Lafferty's "Slippery" is a textbook example of how Lafferty is both light-hearted and a stringent moralist. The moralizing is so lightly applied that a reader without much moral instinct will miss it entirely. In the story, Roy Mega and Austro develop a friction-destroying mist called "Slippery-Gip," which unleashes chaos. Austro revels in the way everything slides around uncontrollably, and he plans to blackmail the world by targeting people and their possessions with this hyper-slick substance based on super-glycerine. A certain General Gamaliel and his team arrive to stop him, and the general unveils a counter-plot that endangers Austro's own kind on the Guna Slopes of Africa. Faced with the threat to his fellow Australopithecines (there are exactly 99 of them), Austro backs down and abandons his plan but still tries to capitalize on it.

The moral dimension is what the Slippery-Gip unsticks, what it "gyps" people out of having: the unspoken social, moral, and physical rules that hold culture together. In the story, Lafferty creates a hilarious catalogue of things that slide free, making their moral affordances impossible. In this story, unlike in some of the other Men Knew Everything stories, Austro is a moral primitive. It is only his empathy that brings him back into the space of moral reasons, which he quickly attempts to cash in when his blackmail scheme fails by creating stock options. That, of course, is itself a moral criticism.

Here is a diagram showing how all that works: